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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2015
her message would "o er some comfort
and relief for the community." He told
me, "Chapel Hill has students from all
over the world. I thought people would
be glad to know that this wasn't some
big anti-Muslim campaign." She fol-
lowed his advice and held the press con-
ference, but it didn't gain much traction.
Ascribing motive to a crime is a mess-
ier business than we are sometimes will-
ing to concede. Joseph E. Kennedy, a
law professor at Chapel Hill, told me,
"TV usually depicts killers as cold and
calculating, but the mind of a murderer
is often a chaotic, rage-filled mess."
Hicks's fixation on parking suggests a
wounded territoriality---the rage of a
man who felt that his little corner of the
South had been encroached upon by
newcomers who were more successful
than he was.
Still, it seems significant that Hicks's
anger intensified after Abu-Salha moved
in and began receiving regular visits from
her friends and her sister. Imad Ahmad,
Barakat's former roommate, told me it
was his understanding that Hicks had
come "about six times to their house in
January and harassed them." He added,
"I also know that he left a note on Yu-
sor's car at one time. That never hap-
pened to Deah or me." Barakat and
Ahmad dressed like other college guys,
in sweats and T-shirts. But the head
scarves that Abu-Salha and her sister
wore signalled their religion. Judging by
Hicks's Facebook page, any display of
faith infuriated him. He didn't single out
Islam---"I hate Islam just as much as
Christianity, but they have the right to
worship in this country just as much as
any others do," he wrote in 2012---but
he expressed the wish that Jews, Chris-
tians, and Muslims might "exterminate"
each other. As it happens, photographs
taken the day after the murders show
that none of the three students' cars were
parked in spaces allotted to Hicks when
he went on his rampage.
Perhaps it makes the most sense to
think of anti-Muslim feeling as an
enabler of Hicks's crime rather than its
cause. Kennedy, the law professor, ob-
served to me, "It can be easier to com-
mit violence against someone who is an
other. Prejudice is one of the easiest ways
to dehumanize someone." But he added
that it's worth distinguishing between a
crime that involves ethnic or religious
hatred and one that is motivated by it.
Whatever the nature of the conflagra-
tion in Hicks's mind, hatred of some
kind clearly provided fuel. When the au-
topsy report was released, in early May,
it showed that Hicks had sprayed Barakat
with bullets, and that he had shot Abu-
Salha and her sister in the head at close
range. He then shot Barakat a final time
as he left the apartment.
Hicks had no prior criminal record,
and, despite his pugnacious declarations
on social media, he apparently did not
belong to any anti-religious organiza-
tion. According to F.B.I. statistics, only
a small minority of the people who com-
mit hate crimes are a liated with an
intolerant group. Jack McDevitt, a crim-
inologist at Northeastern University
who studies hate crimes, thinks that
Hicks's act should be classified as one.
"With hate crimes, it's not always an
either/or," he said. "You can decide you
want to rob someone, for instance, but
only someone you perceive to be gay,
because maybe you think they'll be less
likely to go to the police, or only an im-
migrant, because you think the police
won't take it as seriously. In this case,
he's angry about the way people around
him live, but he's chosen these specific
people because they also represent a re-
ligion he's intolerant of." According to
McDevitt, one factor that the F.B.I. con-
siders when assessing a possible hate
crime is whether "the level of violence
is more than what is required to do the
crime." By that light, the fact that Hicks
fired a number of shots and pressed his
gun to the women's heads seems relevant.
In the months after the killings, the
public's focus turned away from the
motivations of the shooter and toward
the cultural resonance of the lives he
took.The word "exemplary" came up re-
peatedly in news stories and conversa-
tions about the victims. Many Muslim
Americans, starting with the families,
saw that talking about Barakat and the
Abu-Salhas gave them an opportunity,
if a bitter one.The victims were ambitious
young people who prayed five times a
day and who also loved hip-hop and Tex-
Mex. They had donated their time to
both Muslim and non-Muslim charities:
one of Barakat's final Facebook posts was
a photograph he'd taken while handing out
dental supplies and food to the home-
less. He'd also made a video in which he
talked about his plans for a mission to
Turkey to provide Syrian refugees with
dental care---an e ort similar to his wife's
volunteer work there. He named it Proj-
ect Refugee Smiles, and had the goal of
raising twenty thousand dollars. Within
a month of the shootings, donations had
exceeded half a million dollars. Since this
amount could have funded such a proj-
ect many times over, the families decided
to make Project Refugee Smiles an an-
nual mission and start an endowment
that would aid related charities.
In a terrible way, the murders gave
Muslim Americans a chance to broad-
cast an image of themselves as they had
long wished to be seen. When I asked
Yousef Abu-Salha---Yusor and Razan's
brother, and a medical student---about
this, he responded in an e-mail that
"watching the news can sometimes be
disheartening for us. The ignorance and
turmoil in the Middle East give an in-
accurate image of Islam." He and his
friends and family had thought a lot in
the past about how to "convey the true
narrative of Islam," and had tried to do
so "through service work, confidence, hu-
mility, and assimilation." He went on,
"We even used to tell people that we be-
lieved the best true representation of Islam
nowadays is the Moderate Practicing
Muslim living in the West." His sisters
and Barakat had embodied that idea, and
now people would be more likely to pay
attention when you told them about it.
As authentic as the story of the vic-
tims was, it still had to be crafted and
disseminated. Somebody had to get the
word out about the students' volunteer
work and their immigrant dreams. Be-
cause people in the North Carolina Mus-
lim community were determined to do
something positive---and because many
of them were young, energetic, and tech-
nologically savvy---they were very good
at promoting their message.
The morning after the murders, Far-
ris Barakat, Deah's brother, and Abu-